just absolutly amazing! tours are really good to provide information or just tag along without paying! the walk up to Parc Guell is worth it , great views and just nice to chill really. Also get the cable car up to Montjuic. I went on a good walking tour on a Sunday (when the centre was fairly dead) with a local guy who talked about Picasso's early life, really interesting. Tours can be booked at the tourist info centre which is right where you got off the bus to the airport. Also if you are there when Barca are playing its usually fairly easy to get a ticket if footballs your thing.

it'd mad as fuck, of course, but i found it all a bit vulgar. the rest of barcelona is amazing though. i've always stayed at the gothic point hostel which is smack bang in the middle of the gothic quarter. watch out for people dumping buckets water from their washing up (i hope) onto your head from the balconies above though.

but please further explain your thoughts on gaudi? How is it vulgar? He was completely groundbreaking in terms of how design was thought out and the physical practicalities of a living environment whilst incorporating it with a highly stylised aesthetic. EXPLAIN YOURSELF!

well i don't know a lot about architecture or design but it just looks awful. it's like a bit like a bloated 70's prog album in building form - or as george orwell put it (about the sagrada familia) "one of the most hideous buildings in the world". i do like the story of him taking ages making a model of the sagrada ground floor using weighted cheese that was promptly eaten by mice before he could show anyone, or something similar. it sounds like i've made that up but
i swear i saw it on a documentary once.

Ok to your personal taste you may think it's ugly but that doesn't mean to say that it's not worth investigating. The sheer boldness of his designs and the fact that he was allowed to build such groundbreaking buildings is worth admiring in itself. He tested all the element of design and structure, played with traditional ideas and bent them as far as possible to create some almost surrealist buildings. If you look further into explanations behind his designs and reasons for making certain architectural descisions it becomes a hell of a lot more impressive even if you don't necessarily appreciate the aesthetics of it.

there was some student co-op restaurant somewhere in the middle of it where we ate, it had bicycles suspended from the ceiling and cacti everywhere. It was great. I can't remember the name of it though, so this post is pretty useless really.